Lisa Mitchell

So much for my good intentions at the beginning of the year to post more frequently. Life is too busy. I have all these great blog post ideas and I start out the day with every intention of getting a post up and then life happens, the daily chaos that is life with 3 kiddos ensues and no posting happens. Sigh. Maybe next month I’ll get on her more frequently (a girl can dream, right!).

This week has been in a word, CRAZY. Lorne is out of town, our agenda has been full every day so far, and Maya was diagnosed with bronchitis and has been coughing non-stop and feels like crap. Thank goodness for early bedtimes and wine or I may be certifiable by now.

Just to add a little extra misery to our week, along with Maya’s diagnosis of bronchitis came a prescription for antibiotics, which should be a good thing, I know. I’m glad there is something we can do to help Maya get over this crud, but Maya and antibiotics to not mix well together. She has been lucky, and hasn’t been on antibiotics very often, maybe 2-3 times total. But, every time she is she gets on this emotional roller coaster. I fondly (or not so fondly, really), refer to it as the “Antibiotics Induced Rage”. It isn’t just rage, though most of her emotional outbursts are angry, she is also quick to cry. Being a 7 year old girl she is known to be highly emotional anyway, so you can imagine the crazy emotional roller coaster she is on now thanks to the antibiotics! Not fun, for her or the rest of us living with her. I feel like I may be the only one with a child who reacts this way on antibiotics. Dr. Google tells me others have similar problems, but no one I’ve talked to in real life has this problem. I feel so lucky :/

At least this is a fairly short round of antibiotics, only 5 days, so hopefully we’ll be in the clear again by early next week. Fingers crossed!

The fact that I managed to post twice last month is truly a miracle. The fact that those posts were about illness and sleep deprivation speaks volumes to how the month of January treated us. Our household, or at least 3 of us anyway, spent the entire month sick. I am not sad to see January come to an end.

Our month started with me coming down with a nasty case of pneumonia that had me down for the count for 10 days and then spending another week or so attempting to get myself back to completely healthy. It was not the way I wanted to start 2015. Right on the heels of my recovery from that not so fun illness Anna and Nora got sick with the worst virus either of them have ever had. Anna spent 8 straight days with a fever, 8 days!! Nora started out with croup and then got a stomach bug on top of it.

I mean, seriously, is there is anything sadder than a baby who is pukey. It is heartbreaking, especially because they don’t understand what is going on. There were a lot of tears both from her and from me during those 4 or 5 days. My usual spunky, into everything, busy baby spent much of a 4 day period either laying on the floor or cuddled against someone’s chest.

They were both so sick I didn’t know what to do for them. We made a couple of trips to the pediatrician (hopefully we avoided picking up any additional bugs while we were there!). An 8 day fever and a baby who is visibly losing weight because she can’t keep anything down are both scary. The verdict after both appointments was that they both had a super nasty virus, likely the same virus with different symptoms. I was so thankful for our awesome pediatrician for talking me off the ledge. Watching your baby throw up everything so many times and seeing the number on the scale drop by 2 lbs in just 3 days is no picnic. Coupled with a kiddo who kept running a high fever every day and couldn’t stop coughing long enough to get the sleep she desperately needed made for one frazzled momma.

It is so hard when 2 kiddos are sick at the same time. They both just want snuggles and love but your arms and lap are only so big. It is so hard to make sure they both get the love they need. Not to mention that Nora passed on the tummy bug to me, thank goodness I just got the 24 hr variety. The word exhausted doesn’t quite capture how I feel now that it is over (knock on wood). I don’t know if I will ever fully recover the sleep I lost last week. Luckily they both seem to be on the mend now, though defiantly aren’t all the way there yet.

I feel like this month from hell has aged me many years. Good riddance January! Can’t say I’m sad to be done with you.

Nora is not a good sleeper. There I said it. It is the first time in my 7 year career of motherhood that I have utter the phrase “My child is a bad sleeper.” Not because I had bad sleepers and didn’t want to admit it. I have been able to avoid it because my girls are good sleepers. Well, at least until the last 6 months or so with Nora. The last 6 months or so have been rough to say the least. Nora isn’t sleeping well, which in turn means I am not sleeping well. A sleepy Lisa makes for a grumpy, impatient Lisa, which, as you can imagine, makes things a little crazier around this already crazy house.

When Nora was a wee baby, really for the first 9 months or so, she was an excellent sleeper. She was sleeping through the night, like 10-12 hour stretches kind of sleeping through the night, at 6 weeks old. She always went down easily and sleep like a charm all night, rarely waking and if she did usually only once and then right back to sleep. She even slept in a bit in the morning a lot of the time. It was fantastic. It made me so incredibly grateful and I didn’t talk about it much for fear I would jinx the perfectness of it.

When she started teething things began to take a turn. She began to wake at night more often but at first she always returned to her good sleeping habits. Then something happened. I don’t know what. It began one week when she was working on her first molars and had a cold all at the same time. She was so obviously not feeling well and was grumpy pretty much all day long. I did what I could by giving her tylenol for her teeth and setting up the humidifier for her stuffy nose. It didn’t help much. She began waking up 2, 3 and even sometimes 4 times a night. It went on for weeks. Long after the cold went away. I figured maybe it was the teeth more than the cold. The frequent night wakings continued. Month after month, tooth after tooth.

And here we are a good 6 months or so later and Nora is still waking up 2, 3 and sometimes 4 times a night. It is beyond exhausting. Now that she is fairly vocal she no longer cries, she stands up in her crib and screams, I mean screaming at the top of her lungs kind of screams, for me. I am rudely awakened by the sound of a blood curdling “Mooooommmmm!” at all hours of the night. She won’t let me just rock her, I have to nurse her every time. It is maddening and exhausting. She is hard to resist though in all her cuteness!

I’m ready for something to give. Something has to give, I need more sleep. I know at some point I’m going to have to play the bad guy and refuse to nurse her or let her cry it out or something. I obviously haven’t hit rock bottom yet because I’m not quite ready to do that. Plus, given the volume of her screaming if I let her cry (or rather yell) it out she is bound to wake up the rest of the house and the only thing worse than being up with one child multiply times a night is being up with more than one child multiply times a night! So, I guess for now we will carry on being sleepless in Seattle until she final returns to sleeping well (I secretly hold out hope that she will) or I hit by breaking point and force nudge her in that direction.

We are 13 days into 2015 and I finally feel like the new year is starting. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks under the heavy fog of illness. I literally can’t remember large chunks of the past 2 weeks. 2015 came in with a bang, a bang of illness, for me. After spending a great night ringing in the New Year with friends I woke up New Years Day to body aches, chills and a low grade fever. Things steadily got worse from there. I don’t think I have ever been so sick in my entire life. I spent much of the next 10 days like this.

Luckily Lorne was around to pick up the slack and help care for the littles who aren’t big fans of mommy being sick.

After a full week of battling a fever, body aches, constant headaches and the onset of popping sounds coming from my lungs I finally headed to the doctor to get checked out. Of course, I had already self diagnosed with the help of Dr. Google and I knew I either had the flu, bronchitis or worse case, pneumonia, but I figured I should probably let a really doctor check me out. Plus, I was so over being sick and was really hoping whatever I had could be cured with medication of some kind. It didn’t take long for the doctor to figure out what was going on with me. I had pneumonia, the walking pneumonia variety, which gave me the strength to get around and kept me out of the hospital, but pneumonia nonetheless. With a prescription in hand for some heavy duty antibiotics and strict instructions to take it extremely easy until I started to feel better, I was on my way.

A few days later I finally began to get a glimpse of my old self again. The meds were doing the trick and slowly but surely I returned to the land of the living. I’ve completed my round of antibiotics and other than a lingering cough and still feeling a little more tired than normal I feel SO much better. That illness knocked my socks off and I am more than glad to have it behind me.

So, now that we are 2 weeks into 2015 and I am finally feeling better again lets get this party started. Here’s to a wonderful 2015. I’m looking forward to some incredible adventures with my little family.

It is seriously laughable how difficult it is to find time these days to sit down and bust out a blog post. I think one of my resolutions for 2015 needs to be to do a better job at churning out new content for this here blog!

Anyway, a little over a month ago our Miss Anna took a big step into the world of becoming a big girl, she started preschool!

She had been saying since before Maya headed back to school this year that she wanted to go to preschool. She would tell anyone who would listen that she was going to start preschool (even though I hadn’t signed her up or planned on sending her this year). My original plan for this year was to do some at home preschool type stuff with her, sign up for a few classes like gymnastics and then send her to preschool next year. She still seemed so little to me. After much bugging I decided she was ready and I needed to get her into a program. A friend of ours recommended their program to us and they happened to still have an opening in their 3s class so we I looked into it. We did a tour and we loved it! She started class the following week.

The first few weeks were a little rough. She was shy and sad every time I dropped her off and begged not to go back I was surprised by her reaction given how much she begged to go and how not shy she usually is. But, the last couple of weeks have gone really well. She doesn’t cry at drop off anymore and is all smiles and full of stories when I pick her up. Progress!

The program is only twice a week for 2.5 hours, similar to what Maya did her first year of preschool. I think it is a good way to start. I can’t believe she is already at this stage. She is growing up so fast.